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I came here looking for wallpaper aesthetics to fit / inspire a written story idea I had. I wrote a thousand words of it and liked it, but after the glow of a new idea comes the struggle of keeping it alive. It's especially hard when you put your work out for honest, no-holds barred critique, and... no one just fucking replies, ever. You can put your heart out on the page, sharpen your writing style to as spare and precise as you can make it, do as much goddamn research as you want, and invite flaming as unrestrained as old-school mailing list tradition in the pursuit of constant artistic improvement, but what does it fucking matter if no one even takes the bait?
It's a bit heavy-handed, but I'm reminded of Elie Wiesel's speech about indifference and the extermination camps: to be abandoned by God is worse than to be hated by God. At least you would have an answer. How am I supposed to know if I've improved, if I'm just a hack, if I'm actually an insensitive racist bigot who produces outdated garbage not liberal enough for a diverse world, or anything in between, if I can't even get an honest insight into what makes my work click or not? Sending work to publications requires fees, and double if you actually want critique, just to meet with writers who critique based on their tastes and not on elements of logic or style. Get your foot in the door by sending money you don't have, or just meet with no one willing to tell you your work is shit or not.
They say first you have to be happy with what you write, but why would I be happy languishing in a hole of my own choosing and never knowing if you're ever getting closer to expressing, as Hemingway once said, the way to write truly?
